This week we began by working on our presentations, notes and connecting evidence to claims. While working on our prezi, we remembered that last week we learned to add pictures in our prezi instead of a lot of text because all the text could distract the audience. We also made sure to add a lot of quotes from the stories in order to really connect our main points and arguments to the actual short stories that we read. This article state many distractions that presentations commonly have http://www.speakingaboutpresenting.com/audience/6-major-distractions-to-eliminate-in-your-presentations/ . The second thing we did this week was give and listen to the presentations. It was really interesting to hear how everyone else interpreted their elements of fiction. Even the presentations of the same elements that I had were different and some of our opinions differed. After our presentation slot, we were taken in the hall to talk about how we did and what things we needed to work on. One of the things we had to work on was that we really knew what we were talking about in terms of our stories and elements, but it did not come across that way completely. He said we were talking as if everyone in the class had read the same stories we did but in fact they had not. When presenting, I felt that I was strong at not just reading straight off of the presentation and letting the class know what I learned based off what I have read instead of just what we wrote down on the slide.
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This week I learned a lot of new and interesting things about presentations and how to make them entertaining for the audience and not boring. For our presentation, we are using Prezi as our platform. We were informed that is better to not use a template because people can definitely tell when a template is being used and it would not make it seem as special. Also, a lot of the templates might not make sense to the topic you are presenting about. Another thing I learned, which I knew before but was re-pointed out to me and I was reminded about is not filling the screen with text. The audience does not want to take the time to read it and it would become boring if all you are doing is reading text off a slide. Instead, you should make notes about what you are going to talk about beforehand, and then put things on the slides that would remind you about what it is that you are wanting to say. More things that I learned this week were more content related and were the elements of fiction that I am working on, which are point of view and structure. So, for structure, I learned about commercial and literary fiction. Commercial fiction is something that usually has a twist ending, attracts a broad audience, and might fall into sub genres including romance, mystery, etc. Literary fiction is something that is more deep and hold literary merit. You can read more about the differences between these two types of fiction on this website https://thewritingplace.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/what-do-they-mean-commercial-fiction-and-literary-fiction/ . This week we really started to get into working on our What is Literature? project and I have started to understand what we are doing for it. My group is working on structure and point of view. I think we chose good topics to work on because they are easy to follow and I understand them well. Also, the short stories we chose to read are very interesting and easy to get into. I enjoy them. I believe doing the close read on the short stories and the element of fiction packets are really useful because it makes me pay more attention to what I'm reading so I can take notes and helps me to understand what I am reading. Consciously trying to recognize the element of fiction in the short story that I am reading help me get more into the story and really pay attention to what is going on. My group has just finished reading our elements of fiction and short stories so hopefully in the next week we are able to begin working on our presentation and work on making it the best we can. We will be using prezi, which is not something that I am used to using so I have been looking over this http://www.computerworld.com/article/2472129/web-apps/82161-10-tips-for-giving-killer-presentations-with-prezi.html to make our presentation better. Last week, I really did not know what I was doing or what this project really was due to the delays we had. This week, when the project was explained more in depth to the whole class, I was able to really understand what we are doing. So know, I am better informed and I feel better about going into the presentations. We didn't really do much this week because of some of the obstacles we had. There was a 2 hour fog delay on Wednesday, so that shortened our class period, we had the school day cancelled on Thursday because of fog and then we had a substitute teacher on Friday. This week something we did do was learn about the What Is Literature? project that we would begin working on. We got into groups and decided on the topics we would be doing our presentations on. I am still very confused about what we are doing with those. I'm hoping to figure out exactly and ask for help because I would like to have a really put together presentation. My group decided to work on Point of View and Structure for our presentation and those are things that I personally find easy to point out in works of writing which I think will be helpful when it comes to writing the paper and giving the presentation. The poem of the week that we worked on this week was also harder for me. I did not really get to think as hard about this one compared the ones in the weeks past. It might be because of the delays we had, or maybe I just did not connect as well to it, which I think could be part of the problem. I tried to do the best timed writing about it that I could, but I do not think it really compares to the past two that I have done. I realize that I will not connect to every poem that we work on, so I think this week was one that was harder for me to relate to. This article explains why poetry is sometimes hard to understand: http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2015/02/25/why_is_poetry_difficult_to_understand.html This week I learned a lot about literature and was is considered literature and where it can stem from. I also was able to think about how a story was different from literature. Literature is the part that cannot be captured in a film or a movie and it is the art form behind a piece of writing. I was able to look into literature as art when we reviewed different pieces of art and uncovered what we thought the story behind them was and how the piece of art came to be. An article we read in class made a few things really stand out to me such as, "The tone and the word choice is what makes a story more than a story; it gives it life and substance, creating the form of art known as literature." and “We can take the plot, the events, the story part of a novel and make them into a play or a film. What we have to leave behind is the "literature", just as poetry, according to Robert Frost, is what gets lost in translation.”. The article we read that these quotes came from was https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zj5O06Bt73qW-jdOYLlbf7cvMAf1SSOi_qA4FEbYD7k/edit#heading=h.tf54u0zf1rbg. A second thing we did was watch a TED talk called "Finding a story inside a Painting" ( http://www.ted.com/talks/tracy_chevalier_finding_the_story_inside_the_painting?language=en ). This pointed out to me that similarly to an art gallery, where you might not connect with every painting, you don't have to connect to every poem that you read. Also, it is helpful to tell a story with art so you can understand it in your own way, and everyone else will interpret it in their own way. This blog post: https://writerlyderv.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/literary-fiction-vs-popular-fiction/ is helpful in finding the differences between Literature and Popular Fiction. |
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April 2017
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